The Cannibal

Late one night beside the still, dark waters of the Blackfoot River, Virgil Sypher brutally dismembered and ate a man. Or so the Missoula County Court decreed. Two years have passed since Wilbur Cole reported on the case for the Missoula Tribune. Now, Virgil Sypher is dead, having jumped from the second-story of a prison several months after being incarcerated. The case is long closed. But why can't Wilber shake the feeling that he and the police missed something?

Yes, authorities pulled Virgil Sypher over in California, fingers in each pocket. Yes, Sypher confessed and later killed himself in what seemed to be an act of contrition. But since then, Cole has risen to Assistant Editor at the Missoula Tribune, and he's finally in a position to pull together the loose threads: the dog gnawing on a half eaten thigh twenty miles from the murder site; Virgil's rambling and mixed details from his confession. Now, Wilber is hunting back through the facts, and slowly coming to suspect the true cannibal still lurks somewhere in his small Montana town.

With a keen wit and literary scope, Jesse Bier's suspenseful novel dives into the psychology of cannibalism and will leave you wondering what monsters might lie along the feverish banks of your own mind.

The Cannibal is a horrific crime novel, threaded with extra psychological and social dimensions that expand it beyond the confines of a gripping shocker.